Halevi: Hamas fighters have not lost the will to fight (French)
Former Mossad intelligence chief Ephraim Halevy said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to subdue the Islamist Hamas movement and should leave now.
Halevy told The Times that Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, and Hamas fighters had not lost the will to fight, which is why they refuse to negotiate.
He said he believed Israel's losses were "painful" and said he had been invited to meet with current Mossad chief David Barnea several times.
Nahum Barnia, senior analyst for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, said any statements by those responsible for the defeat of Hamas "do not reflect reality."
"For three months we have been hearing news about the destruction, defeat and elimination of Hamas, but unfortunately, it does not reflect reality," Barnia wrote.
War without end
He considered that Netanyahu condemned Israel to an "endless war" by his decisions and policies.
He explained that there is a wide gap between what has been achieved in the Gaza Strip and the elimination of Hamas, noting that Netanyahu has set "expectations that there is no way to achieve."
The bombing of any tunnel in Gaza is an achievement, but that does not mean "destroying all military and government capabilities" of Hamas.
In an attempt to understand what happened in the battle of the Al-Aqsa flood, which affected Israeli society, Barnia described what happened at the time as Israel "fell into a deep hole, and since that day we have been standing at the bottom of the pit and asking a lot of questions, to what extent did we fall, why did we fall, where is the enemy who brought us down and how will we destroy it?"
In trying to answer these questions, he pointed out that "getting out of this hole means returning the kidnapped (prisoners of the resistance), restoring security and a sense of safety for the residents of the south and north, releasing reservists to their homes and trying to end the war."
He called for postponing the account with Hamas and stopping the war to return the prisoners, because their death "will be an indelible stain on the conscience of Israeli society and its cohesion, and because we are not currently ready to open a front in the north (a war with Hezbollah), and because we depend on America, the calculation with Hamas must be postponed."
Hamas' condition of stopping the war and releasing Palestinian prisoners means the continuation of Hamas' rule in the Gaza Strip, saying that for Israel this is "an indescribable and complete defeat."
Source : Al Jazeera + Anatolia